Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday March 25, 2007 @04:59PM
from the try-this-at-home dept.

look@thealternative.ch writes "Although many people have asked for pre-installed Linux, and Dell seems to have listened, some still think that buying a naked PC won't be easy. But what about stripping it naked after you buy it? I managed to get Windows Vista (and a bit more) refunded from Dell Germany last week. The process was surprisingly simple: 1) After delivery, ask Dell Support for refund by email. 2) ??? 3) Refund!!! Read the full email conversation in the original German or my English translation. For the impatient reader: The refund is €77.54 for Windows Vista Home Basic plus Works 8.0 (that is 15% of the total amount I paid). The whole process took 2 emails, 2 more to say thank you, and less than 48 hours. The money is already in my account. Kudos to Dell Customer Care (esp. 'Veronika') for being efficient and customer-oriented!"

Isn't it wonderful when the hot/nice telephone operator helps you out with your "problem" in an efficient manner. It's like this little relationship you're having you where she's completely at your service there making your life so so so wonderful.

Come to think of it, you might well find Dell UK preferring to think in Euros too. -- if you call their customer service centre, you'll quickly spot that it is in fact not in the UK, but in the Republic of Ireland.

It sort of used to (assuming that when you said "Britain" there you meant "England").

Great Britain is the island which contains three countries - England, Scotland and Wales. The full title of the UK is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Go back 100 years or so and you could chop out the word "Northern".

Incidentally, the "Great" in "Great Britain" has nothing to do with greatness - it merely serves to distinguish between Grande Bretagne and Petite Bretagne, which is on the other side of the English Channel.

Actually, I know someone who called ASUS technical support to unload on the poor phone-girl about the faulty motherboards (this was the plague of Bad Capacitors). She decided to unload right back. He was ashamed and ended up sending some flowers to the support office. One thing led to another, and now they're married.

I just wish everyone would standardize on YYYYMMDD as the date format. This DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYYY stuff is confusing - you have to look at a list of dates, and find one that has a 13 in it, to figure out which is the day and which is the month. Then there's the MMDDYY and DDMMYY and YYMMDD and YYDDMM stuff...

I've always found this a little complicated. We can't even decide on a standard for a system on how to write numbers? We still have problems with metric/imperial, but now we got different ways of writing the same value? Is there any standard that the scientific community uses? Do calculators in Europe have a comma key instead of a decimal key? Do european keyboard have a numpad with a comma? I know that people in Quebec sometimes insist on using the comma instead of the decimal, and to me it just seem

Yes, but Quebecers have a really butchered version of french, including terms such as "beurre de peanut", "C'est pas froid." when saying that it's hot. And my all time favourite, the word "char" when talking about a car.

I don't think its so much a problem with words or expressions not existing, or necessarily the popularity, part of the issue is English is spoken by such diverse cultures, with so many localized versions and expressions, that typically it is decanted down to essential words and phrases. Its too much of a global language.With sufficient fluency, English also has many / all of the subtle nuances, sarcasm, cynicism, obfuscation that is available to the French, Chinese and Japanese languages for example.

According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the list of "dot countries" includes India, China, United States, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, and many other very populous countries. Therefore I'm pretty sure more people use the dot. The list of "comma countries" seems to be quite a bit longer but contains a lot of lesser populated countries like Switzerland, Cuba, and Belgium, and most of the rest of Europe.

Fuck off with your "US site" bullshit. This is an international site that happens to be in English. That person made a punctuation mistake, but that's no reason to come over all imperialist on us you Yankee piece of crap.

As you do not want the Windows Vista operating system, we will refund you the purchase price you paid for it (ca. 42.29 Euro gross). I would like to ask you to send me your bank details that I can mark the payment in our system. I need:your name:bank name:city (of bank):bank code:account no:The money should be paid back within one week.

Essentially having a customer remove the supported OS wipes them of all support responsibilities. Even gross hardware failures will probably be blamed on the new OS (likely Linux). Imagine your call to Dell Support because your optical drive blew up:

Dell gets a lot of flack, but in my experience they're usually the best of a bad lot. If you are an average user and you want an affordable pre-built PC which you can get support for, it's about your best bet.

The first dimensions sucked, but they've gotten better, and they even seem to have worked through the problems they were having with their business models(the Optiplex 270's and 280's were pretty shocking, the 260's were ok though and the 520's are reasonable). I'd personally never buy one, but that's because building the PC is half the fun of buying one for me.

As for their support experience, yes you'll end up talking to someone from Southeast Asia(Dell left India some time ago) who barely speaks English, and yes they will be working really hard not to send the technician out to see you(assuming you have on-site support in the first place), but if you are sufficiently obnoxious and forceful(I hate doing it, but when I was working in support I just got tired of playing the game), they'll do what you want them to do and fix your problem. HP's support on any of their consumer grade products is much worse, at least it is over here.

When people ask me what computer to buy, I generally recommend Dell simply because their products are as good as most, they're prices are reasonable, and they'll be around in 5 years. I don't build PC's for people because I don't support home PC's, so Dell is as good a solution as any.

I don't mind outsourcing in theory, I can handle the language barrier difference, but it's the sheer incompetence that pisses me off! I thought most call centres back home in the UK used to be incompetent but you don't realise how good you have it until it's too late and those jobs have been shipped abroad.

Outsourcing isn't monolithic - there's no such thing as "outsourcing in theory" that you can have (or not have) a problem with. Outsourcing a development lab is a completely different thing from outsourcing a call center. The latter is always, unmistakably, wrong. And here's why:

If you force your engineers to staff the phone support, they have an incentive to minimize the number of support calls. They will thus pay close attention to the things people call about and will do their best to eliminate those problems in the next generation product.

The moment you create a dedicated "call center", you're already going downhill: Now you have people who did not make the product trying to explain to people for whom it doesn't work, how to make it work. But the call-center staffers, at least, are employees and thus they're still motivated to pass on enough information to engineering to minimize future workload on them.

But when you now ship you call-center to india, you have now created a corporate entity that has no interest in minimizing call volumne. To the contrary - they get paid by the number of calls or the number of minutes spent on calls and thus it is in their best interest to have as many calls as possible. The survival of the call-center rests on there being as many service calls as possible. Thus no information is ever passed on to engineering about the main faults people keep finding (how convenient that engineering is on a different continent now) and if the customer hangs up irately then that just means they'll be calling right back tomorrow after noodling around trying to fix their stuff for another 24hours themselves.

I'm against outsourcing of call-centers even "in theory". And "in practice". And "in anything else I can think of". It's just a bad idea all around - the brand suffers, the customers suffer, the engineering suffers. All that happens is that a bunch of hobos in India get rich.

But when you now ship you call-center to india, you have now created a corporate entity that has no interest in minimizing call volumne. To the contrary - they get paid by the number of calls or the number of minutes spent on calls and thus it is in their best interest to have as many calls as possible. The survival of the call-center rests on there being as many service calls as possible.

My girlfriend used to work in a call centre (not in India of course). There are several points you ignore:

I wonder if they could automate the process the same way you track the shipment of your PC.

Enter your order ID. Enter your Vista key.. and then a refund is processed. The Vista key could be submitted to Microsoft such that it no longer authenticates copies of Vista on Dell PC's (XP/Vista activation and WGA knows the difference somehow, somewhere) and Dell can have the money sent to the user without tying up their customer support line.

Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it, or insist that users do not get a refund anyway (the EU would have a field day and think up some higher billion dollar amounts for fines).

I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.

The uptake on this? I dunno. Maybe a lot of people would use it.. but a far higher number would not give a crap and carry on running Vista. I think shipping a naked/bare PC is extremely user-unfriendly and it also gives Dell a burn-in-test nightmare (how do you burn in a laptop which is supposed to have never had an OS installed on it? Do you then perform a military-grade disk wipe after you put the burn-in software on there? I dunno..). Putting the most popular, most needed for most people OS on the system (Vista I guess) is an okay thing to do. But I do think if you don't actually want Vista, you should be able to go through and click the Refund button..

I recently bought a Dell SR2030, mostly because the price it was selling at was more than 25% cheaper than I could buy the hardware. To me, that is a deal. It also came with Windows XP on it. I swapped that hard drive out with a 300GB SATA drive and installed Linux before the sales ticket cooled off.I kept the Windows HD as sold because I can't get any money for it, and it might, read *might*, come in handy some day. Not that I'm counting on it, but hey, whatever. If I could go to the website and get the re

Yes, replying to yourself is bad form... shrugI just put this together. In my case, perhaps many others, MS has indeed, if not on purpose, recieved payment for what amounts to me getting Windows XP for free! There is something that is simply not right about that, not right on any level. At first glance, it appears that MS is paying Dell to give me XP. That can't be right. According to this story, if I voice my desire nicely I might get back %15 of the value of the Windows that I didn't actually pay for? OR,

No need to wipe the Vista install anyways. Vista is now perfectly legal to install on ANY machine without a license. It sets up an automatic trial installation and you can then purchase the license before the trial is over. So installing Vista on new hardware for burn in testing even if the customer isn't going to buy Vista is not a problem.

Or, if you don't want Windows, buy an N-series desktop or laptop [dell.com]. People keep complaining that you can't buy a naked PC from Dell, but there it is.

Now, whether it's much cheaper (or even cheaper at all) to buy a naked PC than the same PC with Windows is a different issue. I've heard plenty of speculation that, with the discounts Microsoft gives Dell and the money crapware vendors pay Dell to install their stuff, installing Windows on a machine costs Dell pretty close to nothing. I don't really know. I

'Or, if you don't want Windows, buy an N-series desktop or laptop. People keep complaining that you can't buy a naked PC from Dell, but there it is.'Yes, but people don't want to have to buy an N-series. They want to be able to pick ANY computer from the Dell site and buy it with that $40 taken off. Most of the refunds I have heard about are $40ish so I assume that is what Dell pays for the license. Whatever time they save preparing a windows image and imaging the drive that goes into the system is probably

Right now Dell forces you to buy a premium system, usually with some extra markup and the title 'workstation' or 'server' to get Linux or No OS. We want to be able to buy Grandma the same $299 special, minus $40 because we don't want Vista and load Ubuntu on it.

What I bought was the same Dimension C521 without Windows, saving $40. Not $299, but the cheapest I could find on the Dell website.

'Too damn bad then. They offer some of their product line without Windows. If that's not to your liking take your business elsewhere. Yes, it really is that simple!'

I do take my business elsewhere and for that very reason. I also choose to actively let Dell and others know about my displeasure whenever the subject arises. Forgive me if I don't choose to be put in my place and silenced by a few words from a coward. Especially when they do nothing but state the obvious.

Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it, or insist that users do not get a refund anyway (the EU would have a field day and think up some higher billion dollar amounts for fines).

Actually the reason you're able to refund your copy of Microsoft Windows is because of Microsoft itself.

The background story. Back in 1999 some members from the SVLUG and also a Slashdot editor (Chris DiBon

If you are running a burn in suite that runs on top of windows it is useless anyway. For instance, how could you test RAM with something like Vista loaded and preventing access to a couple gigs?Good burn in suites are run from trimmed linux boots or DOS/DR-DOS/custom os/etc. As a rule they are loaded from a boot disk and never installed onto the hard drive.

The biggest assumption in your post is that Dell runs a burn-in diagnostic. This is probably not likely.

I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.

You're thinking long-term though. Setting up the automated process costs a damn sight more to do now than even a large number of refunds processed through customer services costs; you'll never make management with that kind of thinking!

On a more serious note, though, if the cost to set up the automated process is great enough, you won't save any money anyway, as only a tiny minority of customers are going to be claimin

Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it

All they have to do is decrease the discount they give dell on OEM copies of Windows to bring them back into line. They can give any number of reasons for doing this because the agreement would be confidential. This is already how they get Dell to "Recommend Windows".

For almost 10 years, the lock on OSes to hardware with companies like Dell has not been mandated by MS, and finally we see one of these companies stepping up to the plate and doing the right things.

The Windows and or OSes tied to hardware are for pure support cost reasons at this point with companies like Dell/HP/etc.

Even prior to the dissolving of MS only contracts, any hardware company had the choice to not buy into an exclusive package from MS and pay the $5/10 bucks more per copy. And even though MS took the flack for this, it was not an uncommon model in the software/OEM industry and it was also something that the greed of OEMs were eager to take advantage of to the loss of their customers.

I was part of a fairly large OEM company during this timeframe, and we chose not to save the $5 a copy on OEM Windows, and still maintained a great relationship with MS even still we sold naked and *nix preloaded on many systems.

Sure we could have signed a bundling deal, just like we were offered by Corel and even IBM in the early years for OS/2, however saving a couple of $$ per Windows system was less important than providing our customers what they wanted.

So Kudos to Dell for finally stepping up and taking responsibility for the product they are selling...

So far as I can see, the guy could take the money and still
be using vista. At least, I don't see anywhere any verification
of the non-use was requested.
so how does this work? what's to stop someone lying to Dell
and getting 77 bucks

Dell has a record of the License code they gave to you. Hopefully they deactivated the license. I wouldn't be surprised if Dell machines connected to Dell itself for the license server, though I don't know if this is true.

On Vista for corperate installs, you now have to install a Microsoft provided license server on one machine (your domain controller most likely) your individual machines then connect to that server for verification.

Dell: Hi, this is Dell technical support. How may I help you?"Customer: Uh, I want a refund for Vista since I'm not using it.Dell: Okay, I just need you to answer one randomly selected question. What does "ls -l" do?Customer: It displays a long directory listing.Dell: Your refund check is on the way.

If you haven't activated Vista yet, I assume that it will no longer be possible to do so (and so the most you could use it for is about 120 days with registry hacking). If you have activated it, I imagine that WGA (or similar) will kill it soon enough.

Another way to look at it is as Saint Heinlein did [wikiquote.org], "Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and withou

Since IANAL, do any of you know of differences in consumer laws/regulations that may have made it easier for the German or European customer? Previous slashdot stories suggested that a Windows refund have been a mess for US customers in the past.

Maybe charge PC vendors a "Gates" fee that is equivalent to 99% of the revenue of the OS, then charge $1 per Vista copy. So Dell can only refund $1 to the customer, but still pays about the same amount of what it would have sold in a year (assuming all PCs pre-installed with Windows).

From some other cases of people trying to get refunds on XP I've read, vendors will often try to refund the customer something on the order of $10, claiming that's all it's worth. I don't know what the basis for that claim is, but I've heard it's a common way out of refunding customers for their Windows purchase.

This page [linux.com] details some experiences of returning XP to dell.

Personally, I've built my desktops much cheaper than I could buy them with Windows, and I bought my last laptop from System76.com [system76.com], which

I would just get the Vista refund for the principal if nothing else. Even if the refund was only $0.01 I would still get it if I wasn't using windows. Just to show Dell and MS that I infact wasn't using the software.

As long as they dont use it as an excuse to escape taxes one way or another, and its done "by the book", the OEM can refund you whatever the hell they want to refund you, since they can just write it off as custom retention fee or something along those lines. How much they paid for Vista, how much they refund you...thats all up to customer service.

Really any PC system can run Linux or *BSD Unix, you don't need Mac hardware for that.

The only reason for buying a more expensive system like a Macintosh computer would to be to run Mac OSX on it. Otherwise you can buy PCs with the same hardware cheaper from other vendors sans an OS and install Linux or *BSD Unix whatever on it.

Vista did not manage to recover from the aborted install process the previous day and got lost in an infinite loop of reboots. (I wonder what people do with a power outage during install as there was no such thing as a Vista-CD delivered...)

And I've noticed that some OEMs aren't setting up a "recovery" partition (basically, a second partition which can be booted directly from the BIOS which reinstalls the OS) any more. Not good at all. Heck, I took delivery of a PC only last week where there was no hardware fault from the factory, but there was something wrong with the OEM Windows install and it was stuck in a reboot loop. Didn't bother me as we've got a Windows site license so I could rebuild from our own media anyway, but that's not really the point.

I'm impressed to hear you got the crud Works refunded too. I didn't realise that was possible. I bet if more knew/could be bothered Dell and the like would be issuing loads of refunds.
I bet less than 10% of users ever use Works.

I asked dell customer support 4 years ago if I could get it cheaper b/c I don't use windows. They said yes. It was like EUR 80 for xp home. So to be sure ask before you buy. I ended up not buying the notebook. But a friend did it.

Dell has always handled that in a pro customer way. If they just would make windows an option in their webinterface, I don't mind if it's selected, but it should be de-selectable.

The Firefox Web Developer Extension has an option to uncheck all radio buttons. I wonder what happens if you click that on dell's site. I Run off to dell.ca. I am amazed they sell vista desktops with 512 MB of Ram. Well, even if you uncheck all the radio buttons, it still thinks you chose windows vista. It doesn't even report any errors. I think i'm going to email dell and tell them about the bug.

... but here in Austria you can order Dell Workstations with Linux (RedHat) preinstalled. Also, about a year ago, I ordered a Dell Precision 380 workstation without a preinstalled OS (It came with a FreeDos partition containing drivers and docs IIRC). YMMV

I just bought a Toshiba laptop recently (in Canada). Believe it or not my laptop was in a plastic bag with a EULA on it. I didn't keep the bag (I was keeping Windows for playing games anyway), and I don't remember exactly what it said. But basically I remember it saying that I had to agree to keep the software if I opened the bag. Kinda sucked.Of course this is a Toshiba thing and not an MS thing, but unless you want to return the whole machine you're kind of stuck with the software they bundled with it

You are allowed by law to buy a PC without an OS on it, and Dell are obligated to offer to sell you the PC without the OS on it.

Don't expect it to be so easy anywhere else, Dell gets a lot of subsidy from Microsoft for the 'Linux' games it plays.

That's not quite what the law says. Dell are allowed by law to only sell PCs with Windows if they so choose. What the law says is that the "OEM" version of the software may be sold without any accompanying hardware, and that Microsoft is explicitly forbidden

Generally, because the big guy's are cheaper. It's the economics of scale or something like that, I dunno, What am I an economics.. studying... person... ANYWAYS, most often you get better hardware for cheaper from a big guy than a local shop. Don't get me wrong though, the local shop has someone you can bring it in to when it catches on fire, and someone who you can actually yell at face to face, or throw stuff at (I worked at a local place for a year or so while in highschool).last time I looked the price